Webcomic / Cwen's Quest

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Cwen's Quest is a webcomic written by Nick Stroffolino and drawn by Sarah N. It stars Cwen, an angry ex-princess with tiny wings; Riddly, her mysterious life slave, and Wendy, her cute stuffed animal companion and wise sage, all on Cwen's titular quest for revenge against her father. Despite the premise, the comic has thus far avoided getting too serious and tends to address serious situations with black humor.

The story takes place in a strange fantasy world years after the titular character, Cwen, has been exiled via a swift kick off a cliff, and left for dead by her father Lord Attez. When Cwen returns, she finds her father long gone and chaos in his absence. Cwen's interest is in getting even with her father, but she is forced to help some people along the way in order to find him, gaining a few allies as she does so. The story tends to jump between the past and the present frequently through various narrative devices to show various characters' back stories and dropping plot points to be explained in the present.

What makes Cwen's Quest stand out, though, is its bizarre original setting, which fuels much of its humor and doesn't dip into the usual sources like World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons or Final Fantasy. In a world where wolf-men run hordes of invaders as tight-fisted CEO, the mysterious FauX group runs magic like science, a girl has a paralyzing fear of hats, and giant apes with British accents fight dragons, hilarity seems to be the only option left to most characters.

Cwen's Quest also features a creator blog which dives into mostly unrelated side stories about other adventures living in the CQ universe. The author himself seems to be an avid TV Tropes fan, as he has written trope examples at least twice into the comic in response to people putting the comic as examples on tropes that didn't really fit.

This comic stopped updating in 2013.

This comic provides examples of:

Abusive Parents: Lord Attez shouldn't be allowed to have children...and he has many!

Amusing Injuries: Inverted. While many characters have suffered amusingly painful slap stick style harm character has consistently shown to be actually harmed by these including keeping broken limbs for whole story arcs and secondary characters keep scars from being set on fire.

April Fools' Day: A fake cover was put up for chapter 5; it helped that the update naturally fell on April 1.

Artifact Title: Gram calls Cwen by the name "Lady of Seven" because when she met him years before she wanted to seem mature to impress him, so she called herself a "Lady of Seven Years". Cwen's a lot older now, but the name sort of stuck

In one bonus page, Riddly asks Jack of Vampire Phantasm why he [Jack] is the one to get all the fan art. Jack then explains that it's his dark allure, and that Riddly would probably get more if he came over to their more serious story for a little bit. Riddly then pictures himself getting stabbed by Orlock, as Jack often does, and chooses to turn him down. Ironically, Jack and Orlock would later run into Riddly and give him help in tracking down Attez.

Challenging the Chief: This is one of two options for settling disputes over who has the right to be the Witch Queen, though like good magic using nobles they create champions rather then fight themselves.

The Chew Toy: Fans really seem to like it when bad things happen to Riddly.

Disproportionate Retribution: A lot of people seem to want this in CQ but so far none of them have gotten any. In particular, Sven wants to kill Cwen just because their father used to mistake him for her due to the fact they look and their names sound sort of the same...and he's never even met her before!

Honor Before Reason: Averted. The Witch Queen would have gladly just had Cwen killed on the spot when the queen challenged Cwen to an honor duel for the throne. The only reason she didn't was that Cwen had a very large dragon at the time.

Human Sacrifice: The original Witch Queen had literally sacrificed all the children in her kingdom that could be found.

Insane Troll Logic: Cwen loathes her siblings just for being born because her father, whom she wants to kill, kicked her out when a younger sibling was born. She is aware that this makes no sense, but that hasn't done much to change her mind.

Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Cwen has spent most of her life plotting revenge against her father. While her previous accomplishments haven't been rendered entirely meaningless, the fact remains that her father's Jerkass behavior finally caught up to him shortly before she was ready to wreak her own vengeance.

Shout-Out: [[www.cwensquest.com/?comic=chapter-8-page-9-questionable-companions this page]] is full of them.

Shown Their Work: Inverted. The author doesn't research since the comic runs on rules of funny but will come up with detailed explinations for questions asked by fans.

Wordof God: The author has stated that the world of Cwen't Quest mostly runs on the rule of cool and rule of funny, so you shouldn't question things, but if you ignore this and ask the author how something works, he will explain it in detailed pseudo-science, provided it doesn't spoil the plot.

You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Symus the demon cat girl has blue hair, but since the comic is mostly in gray with only occasional color, we rarely get to see this. Wordof God states that blue hair is a demon trait in the CQ universe.

Zerg Rush: Cwen leads one of these as the final phase of Essex's battle plan against Team Vorg.

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